When I turned my attention back to the shelves of booze, I noticed something that gave me pause. I put a hand to Wyatt’s arm, but when the warmth of his body reached my fingertips through the fabric of his jacket, I snatched my hand away again.
“Check this out.” I pointed at a spot on the lowest shelf.
“What is it?” Theo asked.
“Circles,” Wyatt answered, as he studied what I’d pointed out. “Six of them. Without dust.”
“Somebody took six of the bottles!” Theo exclaimed.
“And not very long ago,” I added.
I turned around and met Theo’s gleaming eyes.
“You know what this means, right?” she asked.
I glanced at Livy, who was at the other end of the room now, looking at the photos on the wall.
I lowered my voice so my niece wouldn’t hear me. “We might have found a motive for murder.”
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
“So you really do think Hoffman could be the killer?” Jemma asked me the next morning.
I settled into the reclining chair at one of the hair-washing stations at the salon where she worked. The salon wouldn’t open for another hour, so we had the place to ourselves, which meant we could talk freely.
“The evidence is hard to ignore,” I said.
Jemma wrapped a towel around my shoulders and eased me back into the neck rest, making sure that my hair hung down into the sink instead of getting trapped beneath me. “I knew he was a first-class turd, but a murderer? I didn’t see that coming. Not until we watched the surveillance video, anyway.”
“Same.”
I’d already shared the previous day’s discoveries with Jemma as she fluffed out my hair, studying it from all angles as she always did before starting a cut, even if it was simply a trim like I wanted today.
Now she turned on the water. “So, what are you going to do?”
“I have to take what I know to the police,” I said without enthusiasm. “Hoffman will know I snitched on him and will hold it against me forever. I probably didn’t have much chance of gettingmy money back from him before, but if I did, I can kiss that chance goodbye now.”
“Not necessarily.” Jemma aimed the spray of warm water at my hair. “You should tell the cops about the theft too.”
“What’s the point? It didn’t do any good when I reported it before,” I said. “Hoffman was too sneaky, routing the money through an offshore account. Probably through multiple accounts. I couldn’t prove it was him. Plus, the officer I talked to basically told me the theft was my fault because I didn’t keep my password secret enough. But you know I can’t remember passwords. If I didn’t write them down, I’d be locked out of everything.”
Jemma massaged shampoo into my hair. “I still think you should bring it up.”
I sighed and closed my eyes. “Maybe I will.”
“But now for the most important part.” She turned on the sprayer again and washed away the suds. “How was investigating with Wyatt?”
I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear the eyebrow waggle in her voice.
“It was…interesting?” I tried to keep at bay the memories that wanted to rush to the front of my mind. The dumbwaiter incident was best left undiscussed.
“That’s all you’ve got for me?”
Who was I kidding? I wanted to tell my bestie everything.
“Okay, so a hell of a lot more than interesting,” I confessed.
